Once a priest was talking with a young man who was discerning his vocation. He had actually discovered his vocation to the consecrated life, but he was not sure if he was going to follow it or follow his own plan for his life (family, career, and all the things that a religious renounces in order to follow God’s Will).
The priest said to him: “Imagine that you have a lot of money and you decide to give your friend a gift, let’s say a nice car, like a Ferrari. So you go to your friend’s house and you tell him that you have a gift for him and you give him the keys to this nice Ferrari. Your friend immediately runs to the Ferrari, gets in, starts it, and goes for a ride in the car leaving you at the door of his house.” “That is not a good friend” the young man said immediately.
The priest insisted, “How about if he invites you to go for a ride but he is so excited and fascinated with the Ferrari that he ignores you during the whole ride. You are at his side but he is with his new Ferrari.” “Well…” said the young man, “I don’t think that he is a good friend either.” “How about if he says: ‘let’s go for a ride and asks you where you would like to go’.” The young man answer: “I would say that with that he is acting correctly.”
“But there is one more option” the priest said. “Seriously? what is it?” the young man asked. “If he says to you: ‘let’s go for a ride wherever you want to go’ and, handing you the Ferrari’s keys, says ‘you drive’.”
The Ferrari is our life. God gave us our life as a gift and there are different ways we can use it. The first way is to do whatever we want to do, like the first and the second examples. The difference between the first one and the second one is subtle. The first one is more sincere than the second one, since he does not pretend to be your friend, while the second one pretends to be your friend asking you to be in the car, but actually he does not care about you. There are Catholic who say that they believe in God or sometimes they pray (particularly when they need something from God) but they do not really pay attention to God, God is like a person seated at their side and no more than that.
The third example represents those who try to be Catholic particularly fulfilling the commandments. They ask God “where you would like to go” and they try to keep the direction of their life heading towards heaven and not to go to a different place, which is sin. However, they want to have a total control of their life, and so they keep driving. They decide the route to go to heaven, it does not matter if it is the shortest one or not, the better one or not, etc.; they want to make the decision of how to go and they do not ask nor listen to God about it.
The last example are like those who hear the word of God and act on it (Lk 8:21), that is to say, those who are worried about God’s Will and try to fulfill it in all details, which means giving the Ferrari’s key to Him and asking Him to drive wherever He wants. They fulfill God’s Will as best as they can, since they know that it is the best for them, because God loves them to the point of giving His Son for us (cf. Rom 8:31).
